Cliff Stearns: “I thank my colleague. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this bill. It streamlines, as mentioned, eight separate…”

“I thank my colleague. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this bill. It streamlines, as mentioned, eight separate congressionally mandated reports into one, a single comprehensive report. As chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, as Mr. Scalise mentioned, I, along with Chairman Walden, have looked into the backlog and workload of the FCC. In a report we released in November, we found that annual reports to Congress, such as the Satellite Competition Report and Video Programming Report, have not been completed in years. This is just disconcerting, particularly since the Telecom Act of 1996 was designed with a deregulatory slant-- requiring the FCC to conduct these competition reports to determine whether regulation was indeed necessary. How can the FCC appropriately make these decisions and regulate an industry it has not comprehensively analyzed in more than 4 years? This bill is aimed at reducing some reporting burdens on the FCC to ensure that these annual reports are just that--they are simply reported annually. At the same time, this bill encourages the agency in today's age of convergence to analyze competition in the marketplace as a whole, rather than based on archaic technology-specific silos. We no longer need to consider the Internet, satellite, and cable industries in a vacuum, as they compete head to head in most markets across this country.…”